Episode 13: Doing Things the Hard Way (Reprise)

Years ago, I was on a podcast with a friend of mine, or we were making a podcast.
It was largely a more technical, technicals-oriented podcast, technology-oriented podcast.
But our first episode, I believe it was our first episode, was all about the concept of
doing things the hard way.
Our general idea, or the position that we came to this conversation from, was really
that each of us believed in our own ways that there's a great benefit to at least learning
how to do things the hard way, even if you don't always do them the hard way from there
out.
So the idea being, the way we were talking about this in this particular episode, we were
both developers, so we were talking about coding things from scratch as opposed to using
some off-the-shelf system that maybe would get you 90% of the way there.
Our position was that there was benefit to learning how to build these things and learning
the guts of them and learning how to really, really make something yourself instead of
just jumping to purchasing something, you know, a service or whatever.
Now, I think it's pretty obvious, particularly when it comes to technology, over the last decade
and a half, which this podcast was probably from about, you know, 14, 15 years ago, over the
last decade and a half, obviously at the company level, companies are far more willing to, generally
speaking, to go and purchase some, you know, cloud service software package, whatever it
is, rather than going through a major in-house development effort.
That wasn't always the case.
If you rewind 20, 30 years, there was a lot more in-house development that organizations
would do.
But either way, at the company level, obviously, just due to sheer expertise, staffing, ease
of maintenance, all sorts of things, the purchase of things off the, you know, off the shelf,
so to speak, has won out well above and beyond big major in-house development efforts.
That's a little bit of a side tangent.
That's not quite what I'm talking about here.
I would still posit that at the individual level, it really does make a lot of sense in
many areas of life, not just within technology, to learn how to do things the difficult way
or the ground, and when I say difficult way, I mean from the ground up, doing as much of
it as possible yourself so that you really learn the guts and the ins and outs of a particular
process or maintenance item or, I mean, take, you know, I don't know, homeownership.
Like, it behooves you once to go try a plumbing project or, you know, something to that effect
if you've never done it before, just so you sort of figure out how to do these things.
And we live in a world, ironically, at this point, that it's easier than ever to get the
information to learn how to do something yourself.
And yet, I think people less and less do that.
And it's definitely true.
I mean, you know, again, we can talk about it from all different angles.
Technology has become like this.
There's just so many services out there that do so many different things very easily for
a cheap price that why would you bother building some of these things yourself?
From a homeownership standpoint, fewer and fewer people, of course, really are adept at using
tools or understand the guts of a house or a car or whatever.
Now, the flip side of this, of course, is the argument of why reinvent the wheel?
If it's already a solved problem, why bother, you know, learning how to do it at all?
My general thoughts on that are that there's...
If you don't know how something works, as soon as you get beyond the 80% use case, it's hard
to understand what's going on and conceptualize it.
And you can get caught off guard.
And partly also just my personality is such that I kind of believe that as much as possible,
you should accumulate as many or I like to accumulate as many skills as possible so that
I feel like I can really do things when they come up as opposed to just calling someone to
do them for me or, you know, buying a thing to fix a problem or whatever.
I do like kind of getting my hands dirty, so to speak.
I've been thinking recently about how this all dovetails into the AI revolution that the
world is currently undergoing and will probably likely continue to undergo for quite some time.
So again, I'll back out and talk about this from like a technology standpoint, just because
it's kind of an easy one to dive into.
I wonder to what extent, you know, people coming up now, developers and whatnot, will really
know how to build certain things at a more granular level, given that AI can get you 80,
90% of the way there, and then you finish off that last 10.
But finishing off that last 10, if you don't understand the underlying 80 or 90, I think
will become increasingly difficult.
On the flip side of this, I also wonder to myself, is this really any different than things
were when I was coming up as a developer?
By the time I was coming up, you know, languages like Java were still around, but the world was
getting increasingly more invested in things like Python and .NET and like sort of that next higher
level of language.
But even at the Java level, there's a world of difference between writing something in Java
and writing something down at the more machine code level or, you know, at those lower level
languages, even a C or a C++.
The level of writing there, and I'm sure that there were people at that time looking at the
higher order languages that I really came up through, looking at that saying, well, they
don't really know how to write real code.
They don't understand how it's really working under the hood.
So I don't know if it's any different or not.
And I've been just kind of tossing this back and forth in my head, particularly within the
context of, again, this concept, this kind of value that I've always held of, if you can
learn how to do something from the ground up first, then layer all your stuff on that makes
it easier.
I've also always taken issue, we've heard this saying, work smart, not hard, that kind
of thing.
I've always taken issue with this phrase because I don't see them as mutually exclusive things.
You don't have to pick one or the other.
You can work very, very smart and work very, very hard at the same time.
And I think there's a lot of value in that.
And so if you're going to be using a lot of, not just you, but we as a species, or if we're
going to be using a lot of these new AI technology, technologically advanced kind of tools more and
more throughout our life, it still behooves us to learn how to do things in sort of a difficult
way so that we then can make the most out of using these great new, these great new things.
It's not a lot different than when search, like the, you know, the web and the internet and search
engines were really all coming into popularity.
And I remember coming up through school and having, you know, research librarians and whatnot
and teachers saying, well, don't just go to Google or Yahoo, you know, or whatever, and
don't just search and just find a webpage.
You still need to learn how to do proper research.
And over time, what I realized was it's okay to go out and find non-peer-reviewed information.
The point is not that only peer-reviewed, you know, deep research journals are a good source
of information.
The point is if you learn how to navigate through peer-reviewed, you know, deep journal entry kind
of stuff, then when you're out evaluating things that are not from that kind of background,
you're much better at evaluating whether or not any given thing is, is a worthwhile, you
know, piece of, piece of thing, piece of research or piece of information.
All this is to say, I think as we've gone through the last decade, decade and a half, we've all
become used to things just being easier.
All the stuff you want to buy shows up at your house.
Anything you want to code, you can get 80, 90, 10 of the way there with ChatGPT.
Any piece of information you want is at your fingertips.
It has freed us all, you know, any, again, if you're a homeowner, getting a hold of one
of a dozen people to come and do any given thing for you is very simple.
But I think it behooves us as a culture to at least continue on some level of learning how
to do these things under the hood.
Because if you don't, if you don't at least understand these things that, uh, or can do
some of them, then you'll always be beholden on those items to other forces.
And they may or may not be advantageous for you in the long run.
And it behooves all of us to just remember that it's okay to work smart and hard at the
same time.